"Public Disturbances" in Japan Continued: "Crazy" People Going Nuts
My story from the last post was not quite finished and I will continue my thoughts in this post...So, as I was reflecting on the indifference of Japanese people toward their helpless compatriots throwing themselves into the train tracks with horrifying frequency, the train arrived to take me home (fortunately, no one jumped the tracks here).
As with my usual behavior, I look up at the little TV screen above the door after I got in the train. The news of the day was on. And surprisingly enough, it was about a guy who randomly stabbed 17 people amidst the weekend crowd of Shinjuku shopping area, turning the happily commercial country into another self-inflected bloodbath. The headline of the news quoted the arrested stabber: "I don't want to live anymore."
The train full of people, in the same way as they reacted to the 「人身事故」announcement, just went about their business as usual, playing games on their PSPs or having quiet conversations. "Well, another one just snapped," a few others looking at the TV screen possibly thought in their minds, but no one lingered on why the person snapped and took his revenge on the world. The stabber is locked up, and the injured are treated in he hospital, end of the story.
Sure, random stabbing in crowded areas is not first time or even a new concept in Japan, but neither is a lone gunman shooting up a school/shopping center/religious institution in the States. But comparing how the medias of the two countries react to innocent people sacrificed to the "crazies" just shows how much Japan is behind in terms of sensitivity toward publicly known misfortunes.
For one, the American media, after each shooting, try their best to publicly analyze the past history and the profile of the shooter, and invite experts on psychology to debate on the potential motives of the shooter and the reasons s/he selected the particular victims. The schools/towns that unfortunately played host to the bloodbaths hold vigils for the victims AS WELL AS the instigator of the tragedy.
And as I briefly mentioned in the last post, that is exactly where Japan is behind. Th American media, through efforts to understand their motives, has treated the shooters with respect. Humans are rational animals, and as conscious adults, every action executed has a reason for the execution. And someone with the ability to hurt others with such specific intention and sophistication is definitely not mentally ill and lacking self-control.
Mental illness, when not genetic, only occurs with excess accumulation of stress. And stress comes from not being able to release negative emotions. In a Japan where even drinking is a part of work and dissent on younger ranks are quickly suppressed without compromise, the sources of stress, at least related to work, are just too numerous to count.
Let me close by reporting a figure: about 1.65% of employees at Rakuten are currently taking "mental leave." Assuming that only the most needy one of out every ten employees takes a mental leave (not surprising in Japan considering taking holidays is considered an absolute taboo), at least a quarter of all employees are having some sort of mental problems at the moment. To which, the COO simply remarked, "it is much lower than the Japanese average" (a big lie, by the way, Rakuten about 3 times higher). It is just as my favorite quote from Stalin (a bit modified), "having one victim is a tragedy, but having a thousand is just statistics."
As with my usual behavior, I look up at the little TV screen above the door after I got in the train. The news of the day was on. And surprisingly enough, it was about a guy who randomly stabbed 17 people amidst the weekend crowd of Shinjuku shopping area, turning the happily commercial country into another self-inflected bloodbath. The headline of the news quoted the arrested stabber: "I don't want to live anymore."
The train full of people, in the same way as they reacted to the 「人身事故」announcement, just went about their business as usual, playing games on their PSPs or having quiet conversations. "Well, another one just snapped," a few others looking at the TV screen possibly thought in their minds, but no one lingered on why the person snapped and took his revenge on the world. The stabber is locked up, and the injured are treated in he hospital, end of the story.
Sure, random stabbing in crowded areas is not first time or even a new concept in Japan, but neither is a lone gunman shooting up a school/shopping center/religious institution in the States. But comparing how the medias of the two countries react to innocent people sacrificed to the "crazies" just shows how much Japan is behind in terms of sensitivity toward publicly known misfortunes.
For one, the American media, after each shooting, try their best to publicly analyze the past history and the profile of the shooter, and invite experts on psychology to debate on the potential motives of the shooter and the reasons s/he selected the particular victims. The schools/towns that unfortunately played host to the bloodbaths hold vigils for the victims AS WELL AS the instigator of the tragedy.
And as I briefly mentioned in the last post, that is exactly where Japan is behind. Th American media, through efforts to understand their motives, has treated the shooters with respect. Humans are rational animals, and as conscious adults, every action executed has a reason for the execution. And someone with the ability to hurt others with such specific intention and sophistication is definitely not mentally ill and lacking self-control.
Mental illness, when not genetic, only occurs with excess accumulation of stress. And stress comes from not being able to release negative emotions. In a Japan where even drinking is a part of work and dissent on younger ranks are quickly suppressed without compromise, the sources of stress, at least related to work, are just too numerous to count.
Let me close by reporting a figure: about 1.65% of employees at Rakuten are currently taking "mental leave." Assuming that only the most needy one of out every ten employees takes a mental leave (not surprising in Japan considering taking holidays is considered an absolute taboo), at least a quarter of all employees are having some sort of mental problems at the moment. To which, the COO simply remarked, "it is much lower than the Japanese average" (a big lie, by the way, Rakuten about 3 times higher). It is just as my favorite quote from Stalin (a bit modified), "having one victim is a tragedy, but having a thousand is just statistics."
I think the Japanese are just too inured to these gory events to react much about it. Japanese have seen their glorious years of the 1980s when things were going well for them - the past two decades has been a heap of stagnant economic and political innovation. Japanese culture may have something to do with this - they are not predisposed to take consider rationales behind murderers, nor victims for that matter. That is why there are those cults that organize massive suicides in subway stations - hint hint Suicide Club
ReplyDelete~Jerry
I think a lot of it has to do with how Japanese culture evolved these years toward a more individualistic one...not individualistic like the States where people do not depend on each other for opinions and support (in this definition, the Japanese are not individualistic at all), but in the sense that personal attachment among members of society are just becoming so distant that to pay attention to the emotions and thoughts of others just does not seem to be a part of normal activity for anyone anymore...sad
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